Re:Kanban – The Secret Engineer Killer
by bdehaaff on Sunday July 28, 2013 @11:24PM
(#6119192)
I agree with your thoughts around dysfunction as it relates to fad diets and poor habits. I also think that many engineers think they know best, but in a well functioning org PM actually knows the customers and market and has a collaborative relationship with engineering. Do you think that PM has no role or that in most cases they just don't do it well?
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It's easy for product and marketing to convince engineers by demonstrating results. Usually they come up with some stupid idea, engineers waste time building it, and then it fails. But instead of letting it die, they add yet more sub-features to their stupid fucking feature no one wants.
This is a sure sign of a broken PM group (and product dev team in general). Great teams are made of equal parts PM, Eng, Design and a group of folks who can actually position and sell a product.
For sure, which is the fundamental reason why kanban doesn't work.
If you have good teams basically all you need is a thin layer of process that prevents total chaos, kanban is a good fit for that, but most teams implement kanban in a cargo cult manner.
I've worked on sales driven teams where I fundamentally trusted the sales guy because when he said if you make feature X I can sell it for $Y dollars and we made bank doing that.
Conversely I've worked on teams where everyone was trying to avoid being fired and would only make decisions that were defensible, eg. company X is doing Y so lets do Y, resulting in the usual follow the leader failure.
Yes. I think they are related to the "scrumdamentalists" who I have written about in the past as well.
See -- The Holy Scrum War - http://blog.aha.io/index.php/the-holy-scrum-war/
Re:Kanban – The Secret Engineer Killer
by bhattisatish on Sunday July 28, 2013 @11:28PM
(#6119204)
On the contrary in the Kanban process, PM is the pivotal role. They control the que, the cadence of feature releases, etc ...
Without an effective PM, the whole thing will fall as a pack of cards.
True. But PM needs to pick its head up and think more broadly. A "one in one out" queue is contrary to delivering winning product.
Re:Kanban – The Secret Engineer Killer
by bhattisatish on Sunday July 28, 2013 @11:38PM
(#6119247)
As I have said below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6119175) You need to delink engineering releases from marketing releases. Where is it written that when the engineering releases a feature you need to make a marketing push? When you have a collection of features ready which as a whole makes sense for marketing, then you make a marketing release with all the related PR, hype cycle, etc ...